Surroi: „How to kill Veran Matić“

Source: Koha, OpEd: Veton Suroi 

I watched a documentary broadcast on three television stations close to the president of Serbia (there are others close to him, but these three are, so to speak, proven in their orthodoxy – not Christian, but political) entitled “Bad Times.” The program explained, with sources that sounded like UDB files, how since the 1990s the ideologist and operational leader of the entire civic movement against Serbia, Serbism, and the rule of Milošević, Šešelj, and finally the current president, has been Veran Matić.

The program did not need to show its sources. In the traditional style of Serbian secret services, from the Black Hand to the State Security Service, it is enough to say that Veran Matić is the greatest Serbian traitor; the evidence will come one day.

I have known and been friends with Veran Matić for more than 30 years (the documentary’s authors did not miss this detail, describing me as both his friend and the main propagator of the idea of an independent Kosovo).

I appear there together with George Soros, the American and British administrations, well-known ambassadors and journalists, with Croats and “other anti-Serbian peoples,” with students and figures of Serbian civil society – a long list of people who must explain why Veran Matić is, in their narrative, dead in his Serbianness.

This now serves to prepare for the next death – the physical one.

2.

Veran knows this job well.

For several years, he headed the Commission for the Investigation of the Murder of Journalists, the most famous case being that of Slavko Ćuruvija, the owner of Dnevni Telegraf.

After many years of work, with the contribution of people within Serbian institutions who genuinely wanted to find the truth, his killers (suspected perpetrators, editor’s note) were identified, the chain of command that gave the order was uncovered, and the connection between Mira Marković, the wife of Slobodan Milošević, and the motive for the murder was established.

Mira Marković, during the days of the 1999 bombing, had used for Ćuruvija more or less the same vocabulary that the authors of the documentary use today against Matić: an elaboration of “treason.”

The killers (suspected perpetrators, editor’s note) – a typical group of criminals integrated into the Security Service, or members of the Security Service integrated into crime, all the same – were convicted in the first instance. It was a great moment for independent journalists in Serbia and a victory for Veran. The killers (convicted perpetrators, editor’s note) appealed and were acquitted on appeal.

For Veran, this was a clear signal that the killers were back on the streets, now free from any legal or moral responsibility.

3.

His work with this Commission is a little-known part of Veran’s life in recent years.
Although in the 1990s he was one of the leading democratic figures in Serbia, committed to media freedom and leading Radio B92 as a networking center for democratic voices, with the election of Vučić as prime minister and later president, he responded positively to Vučić’s invitation to deal with the Ćuruvija case and also with other issues that could contribute to improving relations between Serbia and Croatia, and between Serbia and Kosovo.

Regarding Croatia, Veran was put in charge of research into the missing from the Croatian war. The number of missing from that war was still high – both Serbs and Croats – and Veran tried to persuade Serbian security services to provide more information, in exchange for reciprocal responses from the Croatian side, with the aim of gradually locating the bodies thrown into unmarked graves.

As for Kosovo, an unexpected case arose.

During the investigation into the Ćuruvija case, details emerged that could be related to the murder of the Bytyçi brothers. Ylli, Agron, and Mehmet Bytyçi were Albanian-American KLA soldiers who, after the war, while transporting a neighbor to the Serbian border, unknowingly entered Serbian territory, were arrested, tried, and sentenced. After their release from prison, they were executed with a bullet to the head, their hands tied with wire.

For Vučić, informed by Veran of this discovery, finding the murderers of the Bytyçi brothers and prosecuting them would send a signal to Kosovo that Serbia was willing to confront the past. He even went to a press conference demanding that the Matić Commission deal with this issue.

An even greater motive for the Serbian president was that this would begin to fulfill an obligation in US–Serbia relations: for every American administration, past and future, the murder of the Bytyçi brothers is the murder of three American citizens. Likewise, for every present and future government of Kosovo, this case will require resolution as part of any normalization of relations.

Veran explained these developments to me several times and, sensing my distrust, admitted that he himself did not fully believe in the political will behind them, but believed in himself that such things had to be done. Many of our mutual friends watched this with surprise, astonishment, and some even embarrassment.

Each time he explained this to me, he arrived in an armored car with two police officers providing close protection.

In a similar sequence of events, Matić was later stripped of that close protection, and the conviction of the Ćuruvija murderers was overturned.
The murderers of the Bytyçi brothers also remain free.

4.

One detail escaped the authors of the documentary.

When he first arrived in Kosovo after the war, Veran Matić expressed his desire to lay flowers on the graves of Fehmi Agani and Bajram Kelmendi and his sons, Kastriot and Kushtrim.

He laid flowers at their graves, bowing as one man before another: as a Serb before Albanians killed in the name of alleged Serbism, as an activist of freedom before fellow activists of freedom, as an act of personal liberation.

Before they were executed, Professor Agani and Bajram Kelmendi had long been subjects of demonization. Agani was portrayed as one of the main ideologists of “Albanian separatism,” and Kelmendi as one of the main legal defenders of “Albanian separatists and terrorists.”

Those who would later shoot them already had, in their minds, the justification to do so. The same applied to Kastriot and Kushtrim: being the biological extension of Bajram was considered reason enough to kill them. And even if they had not been related, they were Albanians.

That day, Veran Matić tried to open the way to a new page in relations between our peoples, just as he had done during Milošević’s rule. The authors of the documentary would probably see this gesture as further proof of his betrayal.

The authors of the documentary are an organization called the “Center for Social Stability,” a name that sounds as if it were taken straight out of Orwell’s 1984.

The “Center for Social Stability” has identified Serbia’s greatest traitor, Veran Matić, the man who has long been bringing “social instability.”

The logical consequence, in order to preserve “social stability,” is that the next step is now required – a step which, in Serbia, is authorized by only one person.